Networked imaging devices typically manage their own metric information such as the amounts and types of print media that have been used, or imaged upon. For example, each time that a printer forms an image onto a sheet of print media, the printer typically stores this information into a memory. This information can be quite valuable to ongoing business objectives.
For example, imaging device metric information can be used by a billing utility to determine appropriate client billing by identifying the types and amount of print media used to complete an imaging job for the client. In another example, such metric information can be used by an order-processing utility to re-order consumables such as print media, toner, and so on.
To provide imaging device metric information to other applications, a networked imaging device generally exposes an interface (e.g., through a device driver) to allow various applications to request imaging metrics from the device. Responsive to receiving such a request, the imaging device accesses the stored metric information from memory and subsequently uploads it to the requesting application.
Responding to such a metric information request from an application requires the imaging device to dedicate valuable resources such as data bandwidth and processing cycles to return the information to the requesting application. This is data bandwidth and processing power that otherwise could have been used to respond to an actual imaging operation such as a print job. In other words, if a user submits a print job to the imaging device while the device is responding to an imaging metrics request (e.g., accessing and uploading imaging metrics), the user may have to wait a substantial amount of time before the device processes the print job.
To avoid potential congestion at the imaging device while obtaining imaging metrics, administrators typically only download an imaging device's operation metrics on a scheduled periodic basis after normal business hours have closed (e.g., weekly, monthly, etc.) in a batch job. Users of the imaging device can in turn schedule their imaging jobs so that they do not coincide with these scheduled download times.
Ongoing business functions, however, may be timelier or more efficiently performed if imaging device metric information could be obtained from the device in a timelier manner, rather than after business hours once a week, once a month, or the like. Additionally, by the time that metric information is retrieved from the device, it may be stale. This means that the retrieved information's business value may be substantially reduced as compared to what its value may have been had the information been downloaded from the imaging device in a more timely manner.
Ideally, administrators could query for such imaging device metric information at any time, regardless of whether the imaging device may be responding to other requests (e.g., print job requests), and without causing inconvenient congestion problems at the imaging device. The following described subject matter addresses these and other problems of obtaining metric information from an imaging device.